Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Big shot scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence. They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are. For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator. Similarly, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg argued in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) that physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.”
Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. Biologist Richard Dawkins declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”
One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 1980s, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix, proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.
In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the high-water mark of scientism and corollaries, materialism and reductionism.
To be charitable, all this confidence in science’s power wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code. But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.
As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was highly likely or a once-in-eternity fluke. Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states.
There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there. But over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them humble — and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists had somehow convinced themselves, and the rest of us, that they had figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird, weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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